On Madness as Subjection: Fanon’s

Political Psychiatry
Tendayi Sithole

Introduction
This article will engage the subject of madness though Frantz
Fanon’s political psychiatric interventions and will also attempt to
account for the subject of madness as a concept as well as to explain
how subjection is institutionalised. The setting and functionality of
the psychiatric hospital (as observed by Fanon) will be shown to be
comparable to the setting and function of the colony. In addition,
colonial power will be criticised as the mechanism through which
subjection is maintained. Through Fanon’s criticism of colonial
medicine, the article will show how black subjects who are perceived
as mad resist this disciplinary power. The subject of madness will be
unravelled by exposing the sadistic elements of subjection, the very
thing that maintains violence against black subjects. Lastly, it will be
argued that madness is the antithesis of liberation and that there is
a need for liberation to counter madness.

The exposé: psychiatry in the colony

The anatomy of colonial domination cannot be divorced from the
institutionalisation and practice of psychiatry in the colonised society.
Fanon (1965: 118) accuses colonial psychiatrists of collaborating
with ‘the colonial forces in their most frightful and most degrading
practices’. Psychiatry, as understood by Fanon, is a project that is close
to colonial practices and as an institution of colonialism, it is plagued
by the colonial virus. In the colonial situation, psychiatry is part of the
colonial system. The colonial situation occurs in such a way that it takes

Somatechnics 4.2 (2014): 324–338

DOI: 10.3366/soma.2014.0135
# Edinburgh University Press
www.euppublishing.com/soma
 On Madness as Subjection

control of the psychic life of black subjects. As Richard Keller (2007)

notes, colonial psychiatry made boundaries between European and
non-European clear.
In turn, this justified subjection which was then expressed as
radical exclusion. Psychiatry is not, therefore, intended to liberate
those who are caught in the clutches of subjection. Hussein Bulhan
(1980) points out that Fanon’s psychiatric contribution is ignored and
that his contribution came largely from engagement with his political
project of exposing colonialism and racism in psychiatry. Fanon
engaged in what Alice Cherki (2006) calls a ‘psychiatric revolution’. As
Françoise Vergés (1996b: 50) states, ‘Fanon broke with all the premises
of psychiatry’. This is because there are no ethics in the colony in so far
as psychiatry is concerned – particularly when dealing with black
bodies. As Fanon ([1952] 2008: 149) writes, ‘[i]n the collective
unconscious, black = ugliness, sin, darkness, immorality’.
The black subject, as Fanon ([1952] 2008: 117) notes, ‘is a
phobogenic object, a stimulus to anxiety’. Black subjects were victims
of colonial racism and this caused Fanon ‘to develop his own
theories about political psychiatry’ (Youssef and Fadl 1996: 526). It
was J. Postel (1996) who launched an attack accusing psychiatry of
deliberately having repressed Fanon’s contribution to psychiatry
altogether. This is said to have been a deliberate act and one which
caused Fanon to be forgotten as a psychiatrist. As Hanafy Youssef and
Salah Fadl (1996) amplify, Fanon was ignored by the psychiatric
community because his ideas were considered to be too politically
radical. Fanon revolted against the discipline of psychiatry and refused
to be confined by its racist indoctrinations and its anti-benevolent
psychic economy.
As Fanon (1967: 52) declares, ‘the doctrinal foundations [of
colonial psychiatry] are a daily defiance of an authentic human
outlook’. Fanon exposed the lie that in the colony psychiatry is
apolitical and mainly clinical. But when the black subject is mad as a
result of oppressive existential conditions of colonialism, how is this
explained by the colonial psychiatric disorder? Is madness not the
result of that which is this disorder itself? As Keller (2007) amplifies,
colonial psychiatry is the explicit source of suffering. Vergés (1996b)
adds to the debate by accusing colonial psychiatry of creating a racial
state, and argues that its sociocentric and ethnocentric vision was a
political project rather than a way of apprehending madness. The
conception of madness is engaged here to suggest the existential
and psychic damage of the subject in the condition of subjection.
Therefore, madness here is referred to as that which is tied to,

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and inseparable from subjection – that is, the racialised logic of

domination and dehumanisation.
The purpose of Fanon’s exposé of psychiatry in the colonial
setting was to point out that madness should be understood from the
subjectivities that are informed by anti-black reality. Fanon worked in
Blida-Joinville, Algeria where, as Vergés (1996a: 87) acutely points out,
‘conditions were compounded by the colonial situation and shaped by
the racist discourses of colonial psychiatry’. Fanon imagined ways in
which psychiatry as a colonial and racist enterprise should be brought
to an end and wanted to revolutionise psychiatry by trying to return the
mad and the alienated to the society of which they were part. By his
ethical stance he intended to bring humanity to a practice that had
been emptied of humanity. The humanity that Fanon grapples with is
that which articulates political questions and makes ethical demands
which are not reformist, but which call for the total destruction of
psychiatry which has a dehumanising colonial virus. To expose the
colonial racist virus in psychiatry is not to evoke moral questions, but to
begin a political project infused with existential questions fundamental
in bringing to life that which is being denied life.
The psychiatric hospital is largely not known as a hospital in
the clinical sense – but rather as ‘the place of madness’ – in short, ‘the
place where the mad are kept’. The hospital in this configuration
does not have any sense of being clinical, thus, it is a space which
(re)produces madness. The psychiatric hospital as the place of
confinement, control and regulation can be regarded as mad by its
clinical virtue. As Keller (2007: 180) asserts, ‘[f]ar from comforting, the
hospital is a malicious force’. With this absence of the clinical as a
means of curing madness, the hospital is the penalty and becomes ‘the
colony’ in the Manichean sense. Fanon’s political project can be
extended to understand madness in the Manichean sense in which the
subject considered to be mad needs to be liberated from the exclusion
and dispossession of the right to exist. What is acutely pointed out by
Fanon is that psychiatry is in the service of the colonial project and it
has sovereign power over black bodies which have no ontological
density, bodies that are dehumanised and which cannot be accounted
for. Ontological density refers to the abstraction of black subjects from
humanity and the logic of dehumanisation rendering them as subjects
that do not matter as they are humans with lacks and deficits. In
this configuration, their humanity is always brought into question
(Maldonado-Torres 2008).
As Bulhan (1979: 243) asserts, ‘[t]o rule without responsibility,
to influence without reciprocity and to exploit ruthlessly with impunity

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have since became the hallmark of that European encroachment’.

The similarities between the colony and the psychiatric hospital lie in
the use of subjection. The black subject in these conditions is not
permitted to be free and is acted upon. Being acted upon means that
there are guidelines, regulations, rules and laws they must abide by. As
Fanon ([1952] 2008: 83) states, ‘[t]he body is surrounded by an
atmosphere of certain uncertainty’.
Therefore, the ethics which apply to those who are ‘normal’ are
relaxed or even suspended when it comes to those who are considered
‘mad’. The logic of Manichean policing means that, in the world of the
mad, no good can arise and everything should be hardened to deal
with those who are mad. As Fanon (1965) states, the colonial situation
standardises relations asymmetrically, exclusively and unjustly, for
it divides the colonial society in racial ways. The dividing line is
maintained through the apparatus that are empowered to discipline
and maintain colonial violence. Colonial violence is tied to the
psychological and material sites of existence (Vergés 1996a). In this
state, the black subject remains frozen by colonial racism (Vaughan
1993).

Colonial psychiatry: the ideological instrument of colonial

power
Psychiatry has been attacked by Fanon (1965) who cites it as
an appendage of colonialism that produces radical exclusion.
Psychiatry is informed by power by virtue of being the ideological
instrument of colonial power. As Fanon (2008 [1952]: 83) puts it,
‘[t]he black man has no ontological resistance in the eyes of the white
man’. Bulhan (1980: 253) adds that ‘Fanon examined the clinical and
political ramifications of the violence endemic to the colonial
situation’.
The existence of blackness is a crisis in itself. Blackness has been
determined without due recognition of the predatory history of
colonial oppression. So, to understand and cure this state of madness
in its mechanistic form, Fanon deployed models of analysis grounded
on micro-social reality and macro-social reality (Bulhan 1980). Fanon’s
modes of analysis are articulated thus:
Self-analysis, dream interpretation, results from interviews, responses
to world associations, analysis of the protective value of a novel or of
a prevailing folklore and insights derived from personal engagement
with revolutionary praxis were all integrated and dynamically cast into
socio-historical, cultural view of the psyche. (Bulhan 1980: 262)

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The act of existing also means to take seriously the subjectivity of

those who are relegated to madness. As Fanon (1965: 109) states,
‘[t]his ever-menacing death is experienced as endemic famine,
unemployment, a high death rate, an inferiority complex and the
absence of any hope for the future’. The ideological instrument that
informed psychiatry is that the notion of madness is inherent to black
subjects who, due to their deficiency at the cerebral level, are in a state
of anomie comparable to lobotomised white subjects. The psychiatric
instrument of colonial power propagates itself as the antidote to this
anomie. For Fanon ([1952] 2008), colonial psychiatry was a shameful
science, a pseudo-science since it peddled racist stereotypes, thus
proving its apolitical posture as pure fallacy. Youssef and Fadl (1996)
state that colonial psychiatry was infested with racism since it was
informed by racist writings and practices.
According to Jock McCulloh (1995), colonial psychiatry was, for
Fanon, complicit in the political and social oppression which caused
madness. Keller (2007: 161) similarly notes that ‘[t]he complicit
medicine in the structural violence of the colonial situation reveals a
range of iatrogenic forms of suffering and a setting in which medicine
cannot be constructed without also accounting for its operation as a
form of oppression’. Fanon linked colonial medicine, violence and
resistance. Fanon’s aim was to build the subjectivity of those who have
been dispossessed of humanity and relegated to madness, which is the
marginality of life itself. What also arises from Keller’s (2007)
articulation is that Fanon’s writings are therapeutic in that they serve
as a tool of opposition and resistance to subjection and the madness
it causes. Fanon’s writings dissect the anatomy of colonial violence
which is embedded in psychiatry. Fanon’s elaborate critique is that
‘[c]olonial violence took many forms – epistemological, structural,
and physical’ (Keller 2007: 162).
With colonial psychiatry in place, punishment of black subjects is
perpetual and pathogenic existence is legitimised due to the fact that
the subject is rendered criminal. Therefore, the black subject being
colonised should be in a state of permanent policing. This state is
informed by the desire to contain the subject and not allow it to
express its criminal essence – being contained will help to keep the
colonial situation largely intact. If there is a need to end criminality,
it is not for the benefit of those who are colonised.
Rather, the benefit lies in preventing those criminal elements,
perceived or real, into contaminating the colonial domain of society.
Even if there are no criminal elements among black subjects, criminal
elements will be trumped up simply to ensure that black subjects are

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in a state of constant confinement, and in which the perpetual

justification of subjection remains largely intact. As Hugh Butts (1979:
1018) write of colonisation, ‘[m]ental illness, crime, and violence are
rampant’. To be labelled criminal means that the pathological
existential conditions of black subjects are not far from madness,
and they are, to some extent, regarded as places of madness. But then,
this is not seen as part of (or the creation of) the colonial condition.
It is, however, a twist, a pathology that is said to be inherent in the
black subjects themselves. This absolves subjection from responsibility.
The psychiatrist, as Fanon (1965: 112) remarks, ‘always appears as
a link in the colonialist network, as a spokesman for the occupying
power’. This complicity is informed by the desire and interest of
maintaining the colonial situation.

The subject of blackness and madness

The subject of madness sets ethics, clarity and sensitivity by the wayside
when it comes to blackness. Because in the colonial context blackness
is located in the clutches of subjection (where non-existence, non-
accountability of violation and death are permissible) and it is clear
that the domain of madness itself is a self-justification. As Fanon
articulates: ‘I had rationali[s]ed the world and the world had rejected
me on the basis of colour prejudice. Since no agreement was possible
on the level of reason, I threw myself back toward unreason. It was up
to the white man to be more irrational than I’ (Fanon [1952] 2008:
93). Blackness and madness then become synonymous as they are
the aberration from the norm and also peripheral to the domain of
reason.
In the absence of reason, both blackness and madness fall by the
wayside of existence where ‘being the fully constitutive subject’ falls
away and subjection sets in; in other words, subjects are turned into
objects. As Megan Vaughan (1991) states, it is in the western culture
and colonial imagination where the discourse on blackness and
madness is a powerful one. The discourse, as Vaughan adds, was not
about madness itself, but about blackness. Subjection (with its logic of
subtraction, that is, the devaluing of any form of ontological density of
black subjects) is there to ensure that madness is something that can
be said to be inherent in blackness. Orthodoxy of colonial psychiatry in
relation to madness is ‘cerebral lesion, a hereditary defect in the
nervous system or a racially determined organisation of the brain
structure’ (Keller 2007: 9). All these negativities are plunged with the
existential realm of blackness.

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Fanon ([1952] 2008: 120) asserts that ‘affect has a priority

that defies all rational thinking’. It is essential to then ask: who
defines madness? If the psychiatrist and the patient are in a hospital
setting it logically follows, by popularity of reasoning that the
psychiatrist is normal and the patient is mad. Even if the patient
labels the psychiatrist as mad, the weight of normality will be in favour
of the psychiatrist. This applies even to the staff of the psychiatric
hospital in which the colonial context is produced and who are in
the service of subjection and by implication, engaging in the act of
madness.
Madness as subjection should be understood in relation to the
forms of lives that black subjects lead and, as Lewis Gordon (1995)
illuminates, the manner in which the humanity of the black subject
is always called into question. The fundamental question is: what is
madness as a problem of political thought? Saidiya Hartman (1997)
responds by saying that blackness is enunciated from the entanglement
of subjection, which ultimately creates the existential crisis – madness.
This comes into being through ‘the auto-politics that produces the
black body as aberrant’ (Hartman 1997: 59). Anna Agathangelou
(2011) deploys the concept of combative breath to understand
subjection and to account for politics that will bring subjection to an
end rather than reforming it. Madness is a problem of thought
precisely because politics for Fanon are the politics of ontology and
having the commitment to understand the hellish existence of the
black subject whom subjection outs as the structurally impossible
position (Marriot 2007; Sexton 2010; Wilderson 2010). The existential
conditions of black subjects, in their mechanistic nature and also
in their constitution, are prone to institutionalise, naturalise and
normalise madness. In this state of affairs, there will be a collapse in
the upholding of responsibility and the resulting existential pathology
and its dire consequences will largely be blamed on the black
subjects themselves. Blackness is the positionality of the alien subject,
marginalised and cut off from its own essence of being. By the logic of
subjection, black positionality means not being human. The black
subject and white subject encounter is taken seriously by Fanon, since
this is the encounter that constitutes madness. As Fanon ([1952] 2008:
119) puts it, ‘[i]f the psychic structure is weak, one observes a collapse
of the ego’. As Bulhan (1979) notes, blackness exists in the malign
structures of domain and resistance. The psychic economy of violence
being that of possession and control is the very essence of subjection
that makes blackness a subject that is alien to itself and the world
in general.

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Colonial psychiatry sees madness as inherent in black life due

to black lives being lived outside of civilisation. In other words, black
subjects should advance to the ideals of whiteness – the very process
which is said to create madness. This means that the default position of
the black subject is that of alienation and for that, the black subject is
condemned. This is said to create psychic ambivalences, and as such,
it contributes to madness.
The epistemological violence does not permit the black subject to
understand itself and to define and engage madness on its own terms.
What happens instead is that black subjectivities are regarded as not
adequate in understanding madness in its own terms. The psychic
structure of the black subject has been that of torture which leaves no
psychic investments intact. What this does is create a condition of
psychic entropy with neglect and absence of responsibility becoming
the order of the day. There is no accountability since what is under the
surveillance of subjection is, as Fanon ([1952] 2008) puts it, an object
amongst many other objects. So, psychiatry in the colony is embedded
in the depersonalisation of the black subject while peddling the fallacy
of cure.

On torture
The state of black subjecthood in the colony is that of capture where
dehumanisation through torture takes sadistic proportions. To be
captured by the vices of psychiatry, to be controlled, regulated and
disciplined, black subjects are diagnosed as ‘mad’ and are comparable
only to objects worthy of being crushed. For Achille Mbembe (2003),
torture should be understood through the disciplinary, the biopolitical
and the necropolitical. This crushing disguises as ‘clinical’, however, it
is the power which disciplines since the ethics of care and curing that
inform the clinical are suspended, and there is an avalanche of
torturous practices like involuntary confinement, involuntary informed
consent and forced medication to name just a few. To be in a captive
state in the psychiatric hospital is to be disciplined and this denies any
possibility of resistance. As the apparatus, the hospital is the facility that
intimidates and if this does not work, it tortures. The hospital in the
Fanonian sense is the mirror of society. Hence, Fanon (1965) called for
psychiatry to move out of the confines of the hospital to a larger social
arena. Fanon tried to trace madness from the whole socio-politico
psychic economies – that is, the macro sense of the existential
conditions: ‘Fanon’s ability to relate psychiatry to the political
situation made him a pioneer of radical psychiatry. His psychiatry

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was socio-political because he felt that most human problems should

be understood in their social and cultural contexts’ (Youssef and Fadl
1996: 530). Problems that are brought about by subjection are
diagnosed as psychiatric problems.
If society legitimises subjection there will be no ethical accounting
in the psychiatric hospital and subjection can be practiced with
impunity. Also, change in the social should also feed to the social
institutions, like the hospital in this instance. The causes of madness,
then, go beyond the hospital setting and its torturous practices.
Madness is not a biologically determined factor and the existential
conditions of the black subjects should be unmasked as they are, to
some extent, creating and contributing to madness. Fanon unmasks
subjection which informs the anti-black structures that inform
subjection. It is clear that psychiatric treatment is not universal and
for this reason it is essential to understand that subjection produces
particular kinds of pathologies. Therefore, psychiatric treatment if it
is informed by torture is not an appropriate model in treating these
pathologies.
Torture is not only about extracting information; it is also a tool
used to force the figure of the patient to docile submission. As Lou
Turner (2011: 118) avows, ‘[t]orture is the form that the intervention
takes in breaking and disciplining the bodies of subject populations of
colour, in colonial, neocolonial or internal colonial situations’. This
acutely points to the subjection of the black body and it being situated
in the existential crisis of being outside life itself where torture is
justified. It is here where the existential condition of the black subject
assumes madness since the sadistic nature of torture is to impair the
black subject. For Turner, torture knows the black subject by other
means – under torture, application of dehumanising force is the
standard principle. According to this perspective, torture is affiliated
with sadistic dramaturgy. Fanon ([1961] 1990) exposes the sadistic
elements of torture, as being sadism in its pervasive proportionality of
excess. As Turner (2011: 126) counsels, ‘[t]orture must be understood
in the broader context of psychological disorders that manifest
themselves in war, especially in asymmetrical wars in Third World
countries’.
In psychiatric confinement, the subjectivity of the black subject –
the mad black subject in this case – is something which is left at the
wayside of being understood because it does not matter. The existence
of the subject in the sense of being in itself is that of being certain that
it exists to some degree but being uncertain whether it will continue
to exist. Keller (2007) declares that Fanon engaged in the politics

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of critical witnessing. From this perspective, witnessing is not a matter

of seeing, but doing. In other words, Fanon engaged in changing the
practice of psychiatry and Blida-Joinvile Hospital was where he did so.
To witness was not only the basis of providing a narrative account of
the conditions of the hospital, but of providing a sustained critique
infused with the revolutionary intent of changing the existential
conditions – conditions which also extended beyond the premises of
the hospital. Torture remains a scandal in psychiatry in that it has even
continued outside the colonial domain.

Liberation from madness: the fundamental question of

the clinical
Colonial psychiatry led to ‘the impossibility of finding a meeting
ground in any colonial situation’ (Fanon 1965: 106). As Fanon states,
the colonial situation is informed by the effort of the patient to escape
the doctor, and the escape which is informed by the patient wanting
freedom and that freedom is keeping his or her body intact. In the
margins, the patient’s bodily preservation symbolises victory.
According to Butts (1979), Fanon’s political psychiatry addressed
liberation in the broader context. This also made Fanon take the social
conditions of patients as an important consideration. Liberation is
what Maldonado-Torres (2008) refers to as the phenomenology of
the cry. Such a cry, the cry of revolt, is the political act of liberation. It
is the cry that defies all the logic of madness and of reason. It is the
emergence of new subjectivities. As such, the black subject who is in
the black deep hole of subjection will emerge with a cry which carries
an amount of force that shakes the rigidity of the world of reason
which is informed by subjection.
Madness, as demonstrated, is subjection which is the antithesis
of liberation. Fanon’s contribution to psychiatry is concerned with
improvement and betterment of patients. Fanon advocated a clinical
role of psychiatry and advocated centres of curing. This is the act of
liberating the subject from the pathogenic condition and of infusing
sociality. The clinical here means the political project since the role of
the clinical is to bring subjects closer to themselves by means of
existential consciousness which is regarded as external to them. To
cure the colonised is a political act, and this then means the political
project of probing the clinical blurred the distinction between
medicine and politics. Liberation is necessary since madness is
strongly linked to subjection. As Fanon (1967: 53) counselled,
‘[m]adness is one of the means man has of losing his freedom’.

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The emergence of the black subject is that which ‘knocks down

the system and breaks all the treaties’ (Fanon [1952] 2008: 135).
In affirmation of this act of liberation, Vergés has this to say:
To Fanon, man constructs his own history, free from the chains of both
alienation and desire. Man must seize his freedom and be free to act, to
choose. This freedom demands mastering one’s life, one’s desire, one’s
position in society. (Vergés 1996b: 49)

Fanon’s intervention was not reformist, but it was infused

with the aim and purpose of liberation. Vergés (1996b: 48) argues
that ‘transformation is inaugurated by a gesture, a dedication, an
unexpected act, which ruptures the past and impresses upon its
witnesses the thought of the new beginning’. The resistance of patients
in Blida hospital was due to language barriers and memory loss while
cultural barriers contributed to some of the difficulties that Fanon
faced. As McCulloh (1995: 19) notes, ‘the proposed festivals and choral
evenings were inappropriate because they ran counter to normal
practice with Islamic culture’. These activities, which are said to have
no relevance to the lives of those who have been peasants, were
grounds for resistance to Fanon’s efforts.
To suppose that Fanon failed in his intervention in Algeria is to
negate his contribution rather than to see him as trying to connect
with the psychiatric milieu. On the clinical question, it is essential to
regard psychiatry as political work. This debunks the fallacy that
psychiatry is apolitical: colonial psychiatry was machinery in the service
of subjection. The therapeutic outcome of clinical intervention
is articulated thus:
The blacks who gain consciousness of their ordained factorship find
that somehow they have to come to terms not only with a personal
past but also the collective past tainted with scars left by alien forces.
(Bulhan 1979: 260)

While ‘the clinical’ is therapeutic, using it in the context of colonial

psychiatry (or the context of psychiatry in the colony over subjects
whose lives do not matter) renders it not clinical, but wholly the act of
subjection. It is clear then that the clinical use of psychiatry in the
colony is an oxymoron when it comes to the black subject whose
madness is considered inherently pathological and embodied in their
forms of life. The political battle was initiated by Fanon to make
psychiatry uncomfortable. The claim of colonial psychiatry to be
clinical is exposed: it has nothing to do with being clinical in relation
to the black subject who is a victim of subjection. There is nothing

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clinical about colonial psychiatry since it contributes to madness qua

subjection.
It is, therefore, essential to pose the following questions: what
is clinical about that which exacerbates madness? What is clinical about
that which inflicts pain and creates objects out of the black subject?
What is therapeutic about that which detains, tortures and dispossesses
the black subject as what Wilderson (2010) refers to as the fungible
and accumulated object? These are fundamental questions that
point to the subjection of the black subject who is considered mad
in the colony. Raising these questions – which lean towards the
clinical – would mean introducing therapeutic questions which are
not present in psychiatry in the colony. What is needed is the clinical
serving as therapeutic as a form of a political project – and to elaborate
on Fanon’s project of appropriating the political in the psychiatric
milieu:
Fanon’s existential psychology of coloni[s]ation/decoloni[s]ation
amounts to a liberation psychology in which the subject who fights
against the violent maintenance of (neo)colonial occupation also fights
against the stereotype of himself theorised in the practice of Western
social, behavio[u]ral and medical sciences. (Turner 2011: 130)

The questions above demand answers on how to deal with the

structural positionality of the mad black subject in the anti-black
world. It is essential that the emergence of the clinic in relation to the
black subject means that there is another clinical project that must
come into being. This is the route to liberation embedded in what
Fanon (1967: 52) regards as ‘the unanimously hoped-for emergence of
a better world’. This is the clinical project that must confront and
overcome the self-destruction, alienation and dehumanisation which
have colonised the subjectivity of the black subject. The clinical must
bring with it freedom, since madness is, in Fanonian terms, the means
through which freedom is lost. Such a loss gives subjection enough
reason to exist and to be justified, hence psychiatry suspending
ethics when it comes to the black subject being converted into
objecthood. Being outside the realm of humanity is problematic when
it comes to the black subject because the sane and the mad are outside
the realm of humanity. Both the mad and the sane might think that
they are different, but subjection creates madness for both. It is out
of the colonialist construction that they are not human but objects.
In this zone of differentiation at the level of construction and
representation, the black subject is in totality in the clutches of
subjection.

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To clinicalise such a world requires its coming to an end since the

black subject will affirm the ontological position which has never been
in existence. As Vergés (1996a: 94) states, ‘it was the medicali[s]ation of
madness that would carry greater therapeutic consequences’ (emphasis
original). It is important to affirm the position that Fanon found
himself as David Macey (1999: 98) states, in ‘a sequence of
overcrowded and noisy psychiatric hospitals’. These are the spaces
which host subjects who are ontologically alienated. Fanon in Blida
Hospital in Algeria and Charles-Nicolle in Tunisia affirmed the
ontological position of a sick society in need of a cure. It is clear
that this position also exposes the colonial society as being both sane
and mad at the same time.

Conclusion
The thought of Fanon as it relates to political psychiatry is one which is
informed by the desire and the actual intention to change. It is in
actual change that Fanon challenged the conventions embedded in
the colonial psychiatry. Fanon’s confrontations with psychiatric
stereotypes were the political act of fermenting the imaginations and
the actuality of liberation. The subject who is considered mad is the
one who is caught in the clutches of subjection. The political act of
Fanon is the exposé of subjection which is normalised in the
psychiatric milieu, and by extension in the colony. The colony is the
zone inhabited by those who are considered mad. It is the zone which
is alien to the clinical question since there cannot be any clinical where
there is subjection.
Fanon’s dealing with madness through political psychiatry is a
continued resistance against subjection. This is because subjection is
madness and the place inhabited by those who are mad becomes an
extension of the colony. For there to be no madness there has to be the
absence of subjection. Subjection is the culture of lies, deception,
denial, and metonymy, and thus no capacity to tell the truth. What
Fanon exposed is that madness is subjection and that prevents the path
that marches through liberation. For liberation to be actualised, Fanon
made an effort to continually challenge the colonial culture inherent
in psychiatry where psychiatry is the instrument of subjection and
is hence complicit. The psychiatric intervention of Fanon, as a political
act, is liberation proper embedded in the arena of the political.
The cure for madness is liberation of the subject from the clutches
of subjection, and this is only possible in the clinical sense of
psychiatry.

336
 On Madness as Subjection

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